


Harry Potter and the Crimson Shoelace

by Wingzrooke



Series: Prompt!Fics: Stories based on Made-Up Book Titles [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Abused Harry!, Cage and Dog - fighting Harry!, Mrs. Figg's Curtains, Prompt!Fic: Stories based on Made-Up Book Titles, Violent but not Evil Harry!, Wrong but not Evil Dumbledore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-26
Updated: 2018-11-26
Packaged: 2019-08-29 18:40:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,392
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16749529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wingzrooke/pseuds/Wingzrooke
Summary: Prompt!Fic:Harry Potter, formerly of Number Four Private Drive, held up a dripping crimson shoelace. Before him a Death Eater cowered, face pale and trembling. Desperately Lucius Malfoy wondered when everything had gone so wrong. At first he thought it was that fateful night when his master was killed by an infant. Then he realized that, really, things had gone downhill when the Dark Lord first heard that blasted prophecy. He cursed his once-friend Severus Snape as the Potter brat stalked towards him. Really, he thought, no five year old should be able to incapacitate and kill the Pureblood Death Eaters with nothing more than the lace from his shoes. Magic was strange and unpredictable, yes, but only the latest Potter Spawn seemed to perform impossibilities even magic steered clear of. As the toddler came ever closer, Lucius sent a prayer up that his wife and son would be spared. His very last thought, before Harry Potter reached him, was a last curse on the Snape name.





	Harry Potter and the Crimson Shoelace

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! Thanks for checking out my story. :) A long time ago I saw an article in a magazine about funny fake Harry Potter books. Some of these include (but are not limited too) Harry Potter and the: Thigh-Master of Doom, chamber pot of secrets, etc. While searching for that article to read again, I found some more made up titles online and the idea to use some of those titles as prompts to write a fic struck me. As usual my plot-bunny threatened me into compliance, so here's a fic. I will probably do at least one other fic like this one. I would love to have other people take up the prompt idea, and please let me know if you do! I would love to read those stories! Anyways, hope you enjoy the story.

 

* * *

 

                When Albus-Too-Many-Names-Dumbledore left little Harry Potter on his Aunt and Uncle’s doorstep, he had a very good idea of what would happen to the baby from then on. He assumed the boy would be neglected, mistreated, and probably somewhat abused. He knew there was a great deal of love lost between the sisters ever since Lilly received her Hogwarts letter. He also knew, or rather believed he knew, that there was still a sort of love that the sisters had buried deeply underneath the hurt. It was this ‘buried love’ that Dumbledore believed would convince Petunia Dursley to take in her nephew. Despite what people would accuse him of, however, Dumbledore was not an optimist. Just in case a trace of lingering sibling affection was not enough Dumbledore also added a warning in his letter. He knew that any mother and wife truly dedicated to their family would take in an innocent baby – even a disliked baby – to protect their family. So he warned the Dursleys that Death Eaters would surely come after them if they did not have the protection Lilly’s sacrifice granted her son. To his satisfaction, as he watched from behind a slit in Mrs. Figg’s curtains, Petunia Dursley did indeed pick up the babe and take it inside. And the baby stayed in the house.

                He watched closely as the couple argued that night and the next day. He also listened via a handy spell he’d placed on the Dursley’s Window. Eventually Petunia triumphed and the baby stayed. As Dumbledore suspected, the boy would be neglected as Vernon Dursley refused to “spend much of his ‘hard earned money’ on that Freak.” But Dumbledore felt that a humble upbringing might serve to make Harry himself humble. Not, as some might accuse, so that Dumbledore could manipulate the boy. Rather Dumbledore thought that it might prevent the newest Potter heir from being as conceited as his father. Though he did not know what happened that night, Dumbledore was well acquainted with James Potter’s hubris. He was personally of the opinion (though he would never voice his thoughts aloud) that it was probably the man’s own high opinion of himself that was his downfall. He hoped to help baby Harry to live to survive _The Prophecy_. He hoped the boy would learn to outsmart those smarter, older, and more powerful than the boy himself.

                What Dumbledore did _not_ expect was for the Dursley family to so hate the baby that the protection never took. Dumbledore’s blood wards, so carefully and painstakingly crafted, could not survive if not supported by the love of Harry’s blood relative. He also didn’t understand or expect that when Vernon Dursley said he didn’t want to waste his money on Harry Potter, he included necessities in the list of ‘waste’. Necessities like food, water, clothing, and shelter to name a few. Had he known any of this information he would never have left the baby there. Even for the potential of fully powered blood wards. If Albus Dumbledore knew the family would spend almost no money on the baby, he would have at least provided a caretaker and money for the young child. Maybe then the following years would have been pleasant for Harry Potter. He might have grown up well-adjusted at the very least. Unfortunately for many, and especially Harry Potter, that was not the case.

                From the moment Petunia Dursley picked up Harry Potter to the day he left their house for good, life was miserable for the boy. Petunia picked up the boy, closed the door behind her, and then crossed the living room to the cupboard under the stairs. She shoved the brat in there atop the extra bed they kept in case of a third guest. When Vernon got home that night, Petunia informed him of the newest member of their household. The baby was fed only once the next day, instead of the six meals a regular baby needed or the ten to twelve Dudley regularly consumed.  Likewise Harry’s nappy was changed only once, about an hour after he’d been fed. No new clothing was provided for the baby, excepting one diaper a day. Vernon was very put out about the cost of daily diapers for the tot, until he stumbled upon what he thought a ‘genius’ way of making money off the brat.

                It all started when his sister, Marge Dursley, came for a visit with her newest puppy Ripper. Ripper was Marge’s prize fighting dog. The dog was excellently trained, and showed no interest in attacking any of the other Dursleys. Not even Dudley, when he pulled the dog’s ears. Baby Harry though, the dog seemed to hate on instinct. Vernon privately thought Ripper could tell the boy was unnatural. During Marge’s stay Ripper used every chance he got to attack the boy.

                “It’s marvelous training.” Marge remarked to her brother calmly, ignoring the baby’s screaming in the background. “Even the wimpiest Dog could learn to be a real fighter with that sort of training!” The woman continued with a laugh. It must be pointed out that Marge Dursley did not truly mean to suggest renting out the baby to aspiring fighting dog trainers, despite not minding using the baby for that purpose herself. Vernon Dursley, however, thought it a splendid idea. He was in the process of thinking up steps to insure the brat didn’t actually _die,_ because then the boy wouldn’t make any more money for the Dursleys, when the boy’s magic kicked in. Petunia had just exited the kitchen door to save Harry from what likely would have been a very sticky end, when the boy started to float out of the dog’s reach. Vernon, hearing his wife’s shout, bolted from his chair and grabbed the baby out of the air. All thoughts of safety measures forgotten.

                After Harry’s first official job as ‘dog bait,’ Vernon and Petunia realized that the boy’s ‘freakishness’ prevented permanent injury. It also seemed to allow him to perform impossible feats. Freakish (to the Dursleys) yes, but Vernon saw an opportunity for something he hated to give him something he loved. For now he couldn’t enter the brat into real fights. He had dreams, though, of entering the brat into real underground fights once he started being old enough. His ultimate goal was to be the master of an entire ring of underground fights, all centered around his prize fighter: The unbeatable Harry Potter. So Vernon kept taking jobs teaching dogs the ‘killing instinct’ with his ‘secret methods’. He had to keep the boy a secret, of course, because even most of the people willing to make dogs fight each other to death would balk at setting a dog on a baby. The boy’s magic, and the boy by extension, adapted quickly to his new circumstances. It was life or death, after all, and there were no better circumstances for magic to protect its bearer.

                Harry, already an intelligent baby, became something of a fighting genius. His first lesson was how to use his magic. His second was that he must never use magic in a way other people could figure out. At first Vernon Dursely let Harry levitate out of the Dog’s reach. Soon Vernon no longer allowed floating. Every time the one year old floated off the ground, Vernon started beating the boy. The first time Vernon tried to beat Harry, an explosion of magic threw Vernon from the backyard into the house. To punish the brat for using his magic against Vernon, the man withheld food from the boy for an entire day. The boy was old enough now, and his magic had enhanced his learning enough to realize this second punishment for what it was. Vernon continued to beat Harry anytime he thought the boy deserved it. Whether Harry had broken a rule or not. Eventually Harry learned to ‘wish’ food to himself, and then the beatings stopped. Vernon kept coming up with new and even more clever ways to punish the boy for misdeeds, however. No matter how clever Harry Potter was, he was still just a baby and could not out-think a full grown man. Stopping the physical violence did not take away what it taught Harry, though. The newest lesson taught young Harry Potter that Dogs were not his only enemies. Humans, and especially Big Humans (adults), were also his enemies.

                There were many planned lessons from Vernon to Harry, along with the unintentional lessons. Young Harry began to learn karate and how to infuse his magic into his karate moves under Vernon and the television’s tutelage. Of course Harry’s only opponents were dogs, but that didn’t deter Vernon Dursley. Another activity Vernon forced Harry to learn was gymnastics. Harry’s other lessons came and went with Vernon’s harebrained schemes and ideas.  At one point Vernon forced Harry to learn to swim and hold his breath for an extremely long time. Harry learned, as usual, with the aid of Vernon’s explanation and the how-to movies he made Harry watch on the television. While Harry ‘practiced’ in a purchased above-ground plastic pool in the yard, Vernon dreamed of underwater cage matches. On another occasion Vernon had Harry learn acrobatics and tightrope walking. This time the vision spinning before Vernon’s mind featured tightrope and trapeze fights. After watching professional wrestling, Vernon made Harry learn how to fight with whatever objects he supplied the boy. Usually that was things like a chair (as seen on the professional match), but could be any old piece of rubbish Vernon got ahold of.

               These were only a few examples of the strange and odd things Vernon forced Harry to take up. In between all his ‘training sessions’ Harry still had his ‘jobs’ to do. Each time Harry got a job, Vernon demanded Harry use the skills from his latest lessons to defeat the dogs. If someone asked Harry later on what his most important lessons were, he would say: any object can be a weapon, and how to infuse those objects with his magic. It was perhaps one of Vernon Dursley’s luckiest moments when his nephew was kidnapped while he was out of town on business. Not that he knew it. Had young Harry continued growing up with his relatives and under the ‘tender care’ of his uncle, Harry Potter would likely have killed all his relatives on his mother’s side in horrific ways. His young mind certainly came up with as many bloody and horrifying scenarios as he was capable of.  No stranger with the ways the body could be ripped up and mutilated, there were a surprising number of ways Harry came up with. Vernon, though, saw only the lost money-maker.

               Harry Potter had been practicing his karate katas in the shed, preparing himself for his next job, when the door to his cage was blasted open. His cage, also known as the re-enforced metal garden shed, had been unopened for several days. Many times Harry had envisioned blasting open the door, day dreamed about it a lot in fact. With his magic, he knew he could do it. Though Vernon Dursley never knew, it was the strange and varied lessons Vernon provided that had stopped his nephew from blasting said door off it’s hinges and then escaping. Harry had yet to decide if he would kill said family before escaping, but he figured he had time. He wanted to learn everything Vernon Dursley could teach him because, in Harry’s mind, all humans were his enemies. Harry knew there were still many humans out there who were more powerful than himself. Vernon told Harry there were others Freaks like Harry who could be trained. He also told Harry that someday Harry would fight the other Freaks. It was then Harry learned that even others like himself were his enemies. So he’d stayed to get stronger to defeat all his enemies. It was the fact Harry was not prepared to take out his uncle yet that allowed his kidnappers to knock Harry out with a jet of red light. He’d expected it was his Uncle with some new training technique, not other Freaks coming to kidnap him.  

               After the door was blasted open, Harry saw a red light which looked very much like the red produced from his ‘knockout punch’ flying towards him. Quickly he attempted to dodge, but the light clipped Harry’s shoulder and darkness instantly descended.

 

* * *

 

               While Harry Potter was busy being turned into a horrifying magical fighting prodigy, Death Eaters from all over the Isle were busy trying to track the Brat-Who-Should-Be-Dead. There was some contention among the ranks of Death Eaters about whether they should kill the boy when they found him, or train him up as the next Dark Lord. The differing opinions were based upon whether the Death Eater in question thought Harry Potter had killed the Dark Lord Voldemort because Harry was the next Light Lord, or whether they thought it was because Harry was the next Dark Lord. The two sides managed to put aside their differences, however, long enough to find and perform a ritual to locate the boy. Once they’d finally retrieved the five year old, they all apparated back to Malfoy Manor and dumped the boy into an extra room while they argued about what to do with the child.

               Had they known of Harry’s fighting prowess, they might have locked the child up in the magical dungeon below the manor. Instead the Death Eaters left the boy lying atop a bed in a guest chamber, full of things Harry Potter saw as weapons. When young Harry awoke, he took stock of his strange surroundings and thought back over his last available memories. Sometimes the Stupefy spell caused a witch or wizard to lose the moments just before they were hit with the curse. If that had happened to Harry he might have thought the Death Eaters were his rescuers. Then he would have either been killed or turned into a Dark Lord. As with so many other times when things might have gone better for Harry, or at least the rest of the world in general and the wizarding world in specific, things did not go that way. Part of magic’s efforts to help Harry survive and make him smarter included an exceptional memory. There are many types of exceptional memory such as eidetic, mnemonists, savantism, etc. Harry’s memory included all those types of memory and more. He remembered everything, but also sorted and stored it automatically in a memory palace that he didn’t even realize existed. He simply knew everything he’d ever experienced from the time magic first enhanced his memory and could recall it whenever he needed or wanted.  

               So when he thought back, Harry knew that other ‘Freaks’ had captured him. Whether or not his uncle was behind this lesson, Harry didn’t bother considering. In his mind, the future had come. What some would consider an extraordinarily luxurious room, Harry saw only as another cage. Just as anything could be a weapon for Harry to use, he’d also been taught anything could be used to hurt him. So Harry picked a weapon he’d used before, one he’d actually ended a Hated Dog’s life with. A weapon Harry could be sure hadn’t been tampered with to betray him or hurt him while in his hands. He reached down to his over-sized trainers and removed one of the shoelaces. He then slipped out of his shoes, and threw them under the bed. When no sound emerged, Harry carefully peeked under the bed by dangling upside down from atop. Seeing no one and nothing underneath the bed, Harry descended silently to the floor and checked the rest of the quarters. First the wardrobe and then the ensuite was inspected for enemies. Finding none, Harry approached the door opposite the rooms one window.

               Harry went to grab the door knob, but he sensed magic on both the knob and the door before he touched it. Quickly Harry sent his own magic out to sense what effect had been made upon the objects. Sensing only locking and warning magics, Harry undid both with his own magic. The young boy creeped through the enormous house he found himself in, killing every enemy he found. Having never been taught to hide bodies, Harry left his enemies where they lay defeated. By the time Harry had used his magic-infused shoelace to slash his ninth Human Enemy in two, one of his former fallen enemies was discovered. Dobby, popping into the washroom when he sensed a mess, let out a shrill cry upon finding one of his master’s friends laying in a bloody pool. The fact Amycus Carrow’s head and both arms were separated from his body didn’t help the elf’s hysteria. Despite his deep desire to _not_ _be the one to tell Master_ , Dobby immediately popped to Lucius and reported. Lucius Malfoy immediately sent his servant to check on the captive, and was enraged to find the boy had somehow vanished without the alarm ward informing anyone.

               Immediately the Death Eaters began searching for the wayward child, assuming the death was caused by someone come to rescue the boy. As the next couple groups of Death Eaters found out, they were very wrong. Harry, to his satisfaction, found that he had no more trouble with multiple opponents at once than he did one at a time. Lucius was the only one to escape the biggest (and last) group of Death Eaters to face Harry Potter. He ran from the back of the group in the hallway and into the library. Seeing the five year old take out so many men at once, never blinking an eye at the horrible and bloody things he did to them, scared Lucius more than he could say. Lucius cast every locking and ward he could think of on the door to the library. Then he drew up the ancient Malfoy wards on the estate to protect the room he was in.

               Finding the door impassable, even with his magic, Harry used his magic to disintegrate a Harry-shaped whole in the wall next to the door. When Lucius saw Harry Potter step through the whole, he felt faint. Mentally Lucius slapped himself. He wasn’t going to go down without a fight, not to a child. Not even a scarily powerful and merciless child like the one before him. He raised his wand and started firing off as many spells as he could think of. Unlike in the shed, Harry was prepared for an enemy instead of a teacher. Not a single spell got anywhere near the child. Instead Harry, his speed boosted so he was only a blur to Lucius’ eyes, got behind the man and flicked his shoelace. The shoelace, glowing an eerie purple color, extended until it was six meters long (twenty feet), and called the other end back towards himself. When the other end of the shoelace reached him, Harry caught it with his free hand and crossed his hands so the shoelace formed a loop. Then he released the shoelace back to it’s original length. He didn’t take the sharpness and durability off the lace, though, and Lucius Malfoy was cut in half before he even knew what had happened.

               Having been splinched once before, Malfoy’s magic assumed he’d been splinched and preserved his life for a few minutes. Lucius toppled to the floor, and lay trembling and pale before Harry Potter. Desperately Lucius Malfoy wondered when everything had gone so wrong. At first he thought it was that fateful night when his master was killed by an infant. Then he realized that, really, things had gone downhill when the Dark Lord first heard that blasted prophecy. He cursed his once-friend Severus Snape as the Potter brat stalked towards him. Really, he thought, no five year old should be able to incapacitate and kill the Pureblood Death Eaters with nothing more than the lace from his shoes. Magic was strange and unpredictable, yes, but only the latest Potter Spawn seemed to perform impossibilities even magic steered clear of. As the toddler came ever closer, Lucius sent a prayer up that his wife and son would be spared. His very last thought, before Harry Potter reached him, was a last curse on the Snape name.

 

* * *

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Well, it isn't as well-written as I would have liked, but it's now two in the morning. So I'm going to post this and hope you enjoy it anyways. 
> 
> Thanks for reading!
> 
> Wingzrooke


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